Free Willing Flesh by Adam Creed Page B

deliberately, ‘I wouldn’t distract yourself by reading any significance into what you saw. Are you going to upset everybody Elena knew, rather than get down to the business of finding her killer?’
    Staffe pulls up a chair, sits right up to Markary. ‘You set her up in that fancy pad of yours and, believe me, Markary, if you don’t tell me why you called Elena Danya on the seventh of December, I’ll drive straight round to your wife and ask her.’
    ‘You enter my home without a warrant and I’ll have you suspended.’
     
    Staffe considers the nature of this threat. To be calmly told that you will be suspended from duty sends a chill to the bone. He wants to ask Markary who he knows so far up the police food chain. But he schools himself that it is better to say nothing. ‘You sent her to the Thamesbank, didn’t you?’ He leans forward. ‘She was leaving you, wasn’t she.’
    ‘You’re in the dark.’
    ‘I know about her plans.’
    Markary’s eyes widen and he looks away, wrings his hands. ‘I had nothing to do with this terrible thing.’
    ‘You had everything to do with it, Taki. Your mask is slipping, sir.’
    Markary laughs. ‘You’re an unusual man, Inspector. I hear you don’t need this work. You should opt for an easier life.’
    ‘She said she couldn’t do it any more. Do what, precisely?’
    ‘You tell me.’
    ‘Carry your baby? Sell herself? Or is there something we don’t know?’
    ‘Charge me, or release me, Inspector. You have nothing.’
    Staffe shows Markary out, watches the Turk reinstate the Crombie to his shoulders; his back straight, his head tall.
     
    Jombaugh shakes his head, says ‘Christ, that’s one nasty piece of work.’
    ‘Tchancov?’ says Staffe.
    ‘He was an officer in the first Chechen war, running things the Russian way . He actually said “the Russian way”, as if I’d respect him for it.’
    ‘You didn’t disillusion him?’
    Jombaugh’s voice goes down a pitch, quieter too. He shifts forward in his seat and Staffe notices that his fists have clenched. ‘He didn’t tell me exactly what the scam was, but he was running something.’
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘Extorting wages from his soldiers. Maybe worse. You hear things that would make your blood freeze.’ Jombaugh squares right up to Staffe. ‘He could kill that Danya girl. Like treading on an ant.’
    Staffe takes out the folded paper from his pocket, writes on it, ‘TM hair re Thamesbank’. ‘Get this to Janine, will you, Jom.’
     
    Ten

    The sun is low to the horizon and the morning mist lies above the fields, which are dusted with snow.
    ‘There’s something odd about this, sir,’ says Pulford, reading through the list of the contents of Elena Danya’s case. He reads it out, under his breath. ‘Jeans, lumber shirt, jumper, hat, a Jane Austen novel and a notebook. Underwear and a toothbrush. No make-up or hairdryer. No perfume or hair straighteners. You don’t think she was doing a runner, do you, sir?’
    Staffe watches England go by. When you are in the city, it is easy to forget that this is all on your doorstep, just an hour or so away. He thinks about Markary and his buried emotions. Perhaps he truly loved the real Elena that she packed away for her trip to the sea.
    The train slows and the tendrils of a Suffolk village come into view. Red-bricked Georgian and Victorian houses, a small grid of Edwardian semis laid out like a picnic blanket of tree-lined streets. A lodge with a steep sloping roof, and far away, tall silver birch trees poke at the endless, cream sky, cloudless all the way to the Baltic, it seems.
     
    ‘They’re building some stuff here, sir.’
    Staffe looks out of the other window. A different scene altogether. As far as you can see, scaffolding and mini-towers of Portakabins. Blockwork skeletons of houses are scattered to the horizon. A twenty-metre advertising hoarding welcomes you to Aldesworth Country Town. A New Model Market Town for Modern Living .
    As they